Category: Articles and Commentary

How to place your family treasures…..

We all have a piece of artwork, furniture or an object that’s valuable to us emotionally if not financially. One does not always outweigh the other.

Even if it’s not worth a great deal of money these are your “family treasures.” Your treasure may be a painting that belonged to your mother, a set of silverware or china that’s been in your family for generations and received as a wedding gift.

Downsizing doesn’t mean that you have to part with cherished items, I can help you place or make room for your family treasures.

Planning

Many of my clients bring treasured items and furniture with them to new residences. Before they move, I they should make a plan of their space. Together, we determine which items will fit and where they will work best. It’s important to plan ahead and know exactly where everything will go before you move.

Items for gifting

There are also many options for donating, selling, or otherwise disposing of items you no longer want or need. I can connect you with trusted auctioneers, estate sale personnel, charitable organizations, and more.

Get started

When downsizing, I advise my clients to begin with closets, cabinets, and drawers. Start by downsizing clutter, then move on to bigger items like furniture. Above all, start early. The more time you give yourself, the more selective you can be in terms of selling, donating, and keeping your treasures.

Adjust mindset

When downsizing, it’s important to adjust your mindset. You do not want to bring everything with you. When you walk through your new door, you will want to see a beautiful uncluttered home….. familiar and inviting!

A montage of a dozen types of Echinopsis cactus flowers blooming. And wilting. And just generally showing off their mind-blowing colors. My favorite cactus flowerings from the 2014 blooming season.

Echinopsis cactus flowers bloom overnight and the flowers last for only a day. Actually, the flowers are at their peak beauty for an hour or two at the most. That's what turned me from a cactus enthusiast into a cactus photographer … the desire to try to preserve some aspect of their freaky beauty. Prior to becoming an Echinopsis addict a few years back, I had never owned a DSLR or image/video editing software.

The cacti shown in this video come from my collection. The evening when it looks like a plant's flowers are about to bloom, I bring it indoors to image. Most of the clips in this montage show approximately 8 hours of change as the flowers open and bloom. A little more than halfway through the montage, there's a series of three clips showing different views of a 24-hour period in the life of a yellow-flowered 'Daydream' plant. Six flowers that opened the night before I started filming wilt to nothingness and another 4 flowers grow dramatically and then open. This series of 'Daydream' clips is followed by another three showing other types of flowers wilting. These additional wilting clips are also taken over a daylong period.

The question I'm asked most often about my cactus flower still images and timelapses is whether I've "Photoshopped" them, that is, have I used editing software to juice things up and create the flowers' intense colors. I do, of course, use Photoshop and Lightroom and other editing software. But not in the way most suspect. Rather than using these tools to overstate reality, I actually use them to reduce the intensity of the colors my camera captures. I have reduced the color saturation in every timelapse clip in this video by a minimum of 10% and some ('Yes', 'Cabaret' and 'Antimatter') by 30% or more in order to have something that wasn't just completely blown out.

I hope you enjoy "Freaky Flowers" and invite you to contact me via my Vimeo account and/or visit www.echinopsisfreak.com where you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about these cacti and also be able to reach me via a contact form should you wish.

The 2015 blooming season is just about to start now that April approaches and I hope to be posting new timelapses soon here at Vimeo.

“I think that women artists are on the upswing, and the market will start to correct as more collectors, in it for the game, will drive the prices of women artists up as will buyers recognizing the talent that has been there all along. As a result, women artists will be doing larger artworks, with Damien Hirst- or Jeff Koons-style studios, and they will also become a greater presence in architecture.

“There will be mechanized ways to change galleries and exhibi- tions, allowing for more elastic shows with an ability to place more art on view in ways that are not possible now. The Google project will continue to expand beyond its 32,000 images from 46 museums and will globalize the art market and increase accessibility and expo- sure for all institutions. This digitization will build the audience for images and ideas about art that will dramatically extend what catalogs and books do today. Art will increasingly reach more people in more places.”

Before talking about the future of art, I’d like to draw your attention to the past, to another form of human expression: music.

Pre-20th century, the music world in the West resembled the art world today. If you listened to professional music, were informed about the genre and attended performances, you were part of an elite class.

Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where listening to music has anything to do with class. Not everyone can afford front-row seats to a Justin Timberlake concert, but everyone knows his music. You can ask anyone on the street about their favorite band and watch their eyes light up. In contrast, try asking someone on the street about their favorite artist and rarely will you find a similarly enthusiastic response. (If this thought experiment doesn’t make sense, you probably live in New York or London—two cities that together account for over 60% of the global art market.)

So why has music succeeded in transcending class hierarchies while art has not? Pessimists would say that fundamentally there is a finite universe of people interested in art, or that you must experience art in person to acquire a passion for it. But these same arguments were made about music and attending live performances over 100 years ago.

No, a love for art is not genetically predestined. Like music, passion for art is nourished from a young age via exposure and education. But while the record player and the radio drove music’s exposure beyond class boundaries, those technologies were incompatible with art.

The good news is that the Internet provides a medium for both music and art to reach anyone with an Internet connection—and therefore holds the promise of a future where art is as ubiquitous a part of culture as music is today.

Given that, here are six predictions about the future of art:

1. The art of tomorrow will be the technology of today. Going back to charcoal on a cave wall, artistic mediums always began as functional technologies. Consider the daguerreotype, once an affordable alternative to commission paintings, now a fine- art medium beloved by Chuck Close. As we become increasingly comfortable with new technologies, they will transition to future modes of self-expression. Contemporary examples include Jon Rafman’s Google Street View art, Dwyer Kilcollin’s sculptures made using 3-D printers, and Katsu creating abstract paintings with spray-paint-carrying drones. And just imagine the kind of artistic experiences made possible by new virtual-reality technologies.

2. An “upper-middle-brow” of art will emerge. Literary critic William Deresiewicz used the phrase “upper middle brow” to describe cultural content that has widespread appeal and stands on its own critical merit. Television has seen the emerging dominance of upper-middle-brow shows like “House of Cards.” In film, Pixar has managed to engage high-, middle- and even lowbrow audiences simultaneously. And Shakespeare accomplished the same in theater. Today art is rarely appreciated for appealing outside of a small world of tastemakers—although examples like Banksy and Christian Marclay (particularly his film “The Clock”) come to mind. But in the future, a larger and more diverse audience of art lovers will celebrate artists that achieve trans-brow appeal.

3. The art market will expand massively. The global art market is about $66 billion annually, but for every one household that collects art there are 37 with the same average income who don’t. If art becomes a ubiquitous part of culture, collecting could become normal behavior for households with disposable income, just like buying luxury fashion and jewelry. At Artsy we are seeing this phenomenon firsthand among new collectors in Silicon Valley, a market we have early visibility into given our tech-startup roots.

4. There will be many more galleries. Some 71% of collectors and 88% of dealers regularly buy and sell art via digital image (sight unseen), and on Artsy we see an average distance between buyer and seller of over 2,000 miles. Additionally, as of 2012, art fairs now account for 36% of all dealer sales. Art fairs and online platforms give galleries global reach without the costs of multiple physical locations. This ability to reduce costs will see a corresponding increase in galleries able to serve the rapidly growing art market.

5. New artists will be discovered faster, and location won’t matter (as much). SoundCloud Chief Executive (and Artsy investor) Alex Ljung recently pointed me to the phenomenon of Lorde, a 17-year-old from New Zealand, who hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 less than a year after releasing her first extended play (EP) on SoundCloud. Online music platforms are making these kinds of discoveries increasingly frequent; and online art platforms will similarly unearth more talented artists regardless of location or how connected they are into the art world’s existing power structures.

6. Education today will ensure the longevity of art in the future. For the majority of the 20th century, contemporary classical music flourished. Then, an elitist outlook that saw no value in educating new audiences began to dominate the genre. While rooted in the values of artistic integrity, this elitist stance was falsely premised on the idea that connoisseurs are born, not made.

Ultimately, ignoring future audiences proved lethal for contemporary classical music, which has now become largely an academic pursuit with the biggest names barely able to fill the orchestra sections of concert halls.

Why won’t the fate of contemporary classical music befall con- temporary art? Because unlike the contemporary music establishment, the art world is educating new audiences via the Internet. Museums, foundations and galleries increasingly publish artworks online and—critically—supply contextual material for self-education (the same reason Artsy created the Art Genome Project, which pro- vides art-historical context and allows users to discover related artists).

As with music, a passion for art is made, not born. By educating young audiences today, we are avoiding contemporary classical music’s fate and ensuring that future generations have the opportunity to become art lovers, collectors, patrons and connoisseurs.

Mr. Cleveland is founder and chief executive officer of Artsy, an online resource for art education and collecting.

When encountering artwork, people often ask some of the following questions. Who is the artist? When was it made? How was it made? What does it mean? There is, however, one other popular question regarding art that people of all ages and all backgrounds tend to ask: how much is it worth? This question is not as easy to answer as the preceding ones, because the answer depends on the intersection of three fluctuating elements: art collecting, art history and the art market.

Art collecting is the basic foundation for how values are assigned to artwork. Those who collect art include individual collectors, corporations and museums. While individual art collectors may pay the same high prices for artwork as corporations and museums, the function of these collections differs greatly. Most simply, individual art collectors collect for themselves, while corporate collectors and museums collect for their institutions and a public audience. Individual collectors may someday deposit their artwork into museums, but collecting categories tend to be more rigid in corporations and museums than for individual collectors.

These collecting categories are directly related to art history. It is art history that defines which artists and artwork are valuable to our society and are deserving of further study. In some sense, once a work of art becomes famous, its intrinsic value increases, as does its financial value. Art history, however, does not happen overnight. It is a process that involves weighing the impact an artist has had on the art world, based on exhibitions, reviews and influence on other artists.

Art history and art collecting together influence the art market. Although the art market depends on art history and encourages art collecting, the foundation of the art market stems from a basic economic rule: supply and demand. It may seem greatly disrespectful for the value of artwork to increase after an artist is deceased, but again, market value assignments depend on rarity. Once an artist is no longer living, the supply of their artwork becomes limited and their artwork increases in value.

This short essay does not fully answer the question it posed in the first paragraph regarding how value is assigned to artwork. It does, however, offer insight into the systems of art collecting, art history and the art market that together inform individuals, corporations and museums what artwork to buy and how much to pay. However, looking at financial value alone when determining the success of an artist is not sufficient.

A successful artist should have artwork in important museum and gallery exhibitions, as well as in museum and corporate collections. These factors are just as important to make an artist successful as the actual sales and again, demonstrate that art collecting, art history and the art market collectively and systematically answer the question, “How much is that art worth?”

After more than 35 years in the economic and community development field, Don Iannone has mounted the creative path as a practicing artist and author.

Don’s educational background includes an undergraduate degree in Anthropology, and graduate studies in Organizational Behavior and Economic Development. Very recently, he completed a Master of Arts Degree in Consciousness Studies, with a concentration in how our consciousness gives rise to art, and how art shapes our consciousness of the world.

Don is a fine arts photographer living in Bratenahl, Ohio. His niche is using photography as a source of insight, contemplation, inspiration, and healing for people, communities, and organizations.

Don has authored two books of poetry and two books combining his poetry and photography. He is working on two new combined photography-poetry books, which will be published later in 2011. Many of Don’s photographs have been exhibited in Greater Cleveland hospitals and organizations, and displayed on a wide variety of organizational and artistic websites. His photographic work has been used by creative art therapists in the hospice, healthcare, and mental health fields.

Don is available for lectures and workshops on his photography. Also, his photographs are available for public and private exhibitions.